BACKGROUND Odontoid fracture is a common injury especially in elderly people. Despite some recent studies arguing in favor of surgery, the best treatment is still being debated. OBJECTIVE Here we systematically review and analyze the comparative literature between surgical and conservative treatments of odontoid fractures. METHOD We systematically searched Medline and Cochrane library for studies published from January 1990 to May 2019 in English language. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/pfk15.html Comparative studies evaluating the results of surgical and conservative treatments for odontoid fractures were eligible for inclusion. Combined relative risks (RR) for mortality at last follow-up, union or non-union rates, and complications were calculated. Methodological quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Influence of age, year of publication on treatment effect was explored using a meta-regression analysis. RESULTS A total of 1438 articles were identified, of which 30 articles with 2463 patients were eligible for inclusion. There was a trend toward lower mortality in the surgical group (RR 0.80; CI 0.63-1.02). Non-union rates (RR 0.41; CI 0.28-0.6) were lower in the surgical group. Union rates were higher in the surgical group (RR 1.26; CI 1.11-1.45). No significant influence of age or year of publication on treatment effect was found. CONCLUSION Based on this meta-analysis of non-randomized comparatives studies, surgical treatment seems not to be inferior to conservative treatments. The conclusions of this study remain limited by the low quality of the evidence currently available. Randomized controlled studies are required. PURPOSE This study modified the traditional extreme lateral lumbar interbody fusion (XLIF) surgery and was intended to reduce the approach related lumbar plexus injury. METHODS The patients receiving a new modified XLIF for treatment of lumbar degenerative diseases since September 2017 in our hospital were retrospectively collected. Postoperative additional symptoms of leg numbness, pain or weakness was recorded as lumbar plexus nerve injury. Intraoperative electromyographic monitoring was recorded during surgery to evaluate the safety of the modified entry point. The Visual analogue scale (VAS) and Oswestry disability index (ODI) were adopted to evaluate the postoperative clinical efficacy. The modified MacNab criteria was introduced to evaluate the patients' satisfaction 12 months after surgery. The preoperative and postoperative intervertebral height, foraminal height and lumbar lordotic angle were measured. Repeated measurement variance analysis was used for comparison of clinical and imaging indexes in various periods. P less then 0.05 indicated statistical difference. RESULTS 59 patients were finally included in the retrospective study. The intraoperative average blood loss and operation time were 70ml (40-130ml) and 77.90 min±13.65. The average follow-up time was 18 months. Postoperative VAS and ODI were significantly decreased compared with those before operation. The intervertebral height and foraminal height were dramatically higher than those before surgery. No lumbar plexus injury occurred. CONCLUSIONS The initial result was optimistic in reducing lumbar plexus injury and obtaining a good clinical efficacy. We need to further expand the sample size and carry out a comparative study to further observe the advantages and disadvantages of modified XLIF. OBJECTIVE The centrality of data to biomedical research is difficult to understate, and the same is true for the importance of the biomedical literature in disseminating empirical findings to scientific questions made on such data. But the connections between the literature and related datasets are often weak, hampering the ability of scientists to easily move between existing datasets and existing findings to derive new scientific hypotheses. This work aims to recommend relevant literature articles for datasets with the ultimate goal of increasing the productivity of researchers. Our approach to literature recommendation for datasets is a part of the dataset reusability platform developed at the University Texas Health Science Center at Houston for datasets related to gene expression. This platform incorporates datasets from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). An average of 34 datasets were added to GEO daily in the last five years (i.e. 2014 to 2018), demonstrating the need for automatic methods to connect theseved a strict precision at 10 of 0.8333 and a partial precision at 10 of 0.9000 using BM25 based on a manual evaluation of 36 datasets. Evaluation on a larger, automatically-collected benchmark shows small but consistent gains by emphasizing the similarity of dataset and article titles. CONCLUSION This work is the first step toward developing a literature recommendation tool by recommending relevant literature for datasets. This will hopefully lead to better data reuse experience. His596 of human ALOX12 has been suggested to interact with the COO--group of arachidonic acid during ALOX catalysis. In mammalian ALOX15 orthologs Gln596 occupies this position and this amino acid exchange might contribute to the functional differences between the two ALOX-isoforms. To explore the role of Gln596 for ALOX15 functionality we mutated this amino acid to different residues in rabbit and human ALOX15 and investigated the impact of these mutations on structural, catalytic and allosteric enzyme properties. To shed light on the molecular basis of the observed functional alterations we performed in silico substrate docking studies and molecular dynamics simulations and also explored the impact of Gln596 exchange on the protein structure. The combined theoretical and experimental data suggest that Gln596 may not directly interact with the COO--group of arachidonic acid. In contrast, mutations at Gln596 destabilize the secondary and tertiary structure of ALOX15 orthologs, which may be related to a disturbance of the electrostatic interaction network with other amino acids in the immediate surrounding. Moreover, our MD-simulations suggest that the geometry of the dimer interface depends on the structure of substrate bound inside the substrate-binding pocket and that Gln596Ala exchange impairs the allosteric properties of the enzyme. Taken together, these data indicate the structural and functional importance of Gln596 for ALOX15 catalysis.